Assurance Summer Intern Review

I enjoyed my experience at the EY virtual experience thoroughly. The mixture of talks, interactive activities and group sessions kept me engaged throughout the process and were interesting. I was impressed by the variety of talks on offer, some not directly related to work EY does focusing on presentation skills or mental health which impressed me. The group activities were fun and engaging and it was nice to meet other attendees despite not meeting each other in real life.

The talks focused on personal development and mental health made me feel valued at the company as it gave the impression that they focused on our progresssion as individuals as well as our professional progression. The talks with a mentor also made me feel very welcome and valued knowing that they had given up their personal time to help us in our case study. I felt like the study was initially a bit confusing as there was some guidance missing initially which I feel would have made us feel more comfortable with the task.

A lot of the experience was in the form of talks over Microsoft teams, which obviously limited the guidance and support that was offered to us individually. However many of these talks were about personal development which helped give the feeling of support. Furthermore the group meetings with mentors and senior employees helped us in guiding us in our case study task as well as providing valuable information about life at EY making us feel supported.

The personal development skills were very useful, being taught things such as personal finance, mindfulness and presentation skills was all very useful as these are skills that directly apply to other aspects of life. Information on the nature of audit also assisted me in understanding more about the profession and will doubtlessly aid me in future should I follow this profession. I feel like the case study work also helped us develop our teamwork skills.

I feel like the experience was very well structured with skills building up on top of eachother in a logical way. There were a few hiccups, as to be expected in any event this large, however overall I was fairly impressed with the flowing structure of the experience. I would have preferred having a bit more information about the case study and what we had to do initially as we were a bit lost at the beginning, however can also understand that this is a way to push interns.

It felt fairly friendly from the staff giving the talks, and the students seemed fairly engaged over chat however creating an active and engaged atmosphere is obviously quite difficult in such a large group virtually. However, in the events involving participation interns seemed to be very engaged and seemed to be enjoying themselves. The kahoot quiz at the end was particularly fun as well as all the smaller meetings in smaller groups than the main large one.

I feel like they invested in me a fair amount considering the difficulty of doing it virtually to such a large group. Compared to an in person internship there was obviously less personal training than possible however feel like the firm did a good job of working around this problem. I particularly enjoyed the talk on presentation as I felt like this was a skill I could practice directly afterwards in our case study work.

I feel like I got a vision of what auditing would be like however felt like it was very vague. I can appreciate the difficulty in doing a proper experience in person and the problem with confidentiality working on actual clients. The case study was an interesting brief look into the work of an audit team however I feel like I would need a lot more experience auditing before actually starting a job in assurance.

A fair amount, we were told a lot about the different values of EY.

Very valuable, it gave an interesting insight into the world of assurance.

Yes I was very happy with the pay for this internship considering that it was in the form of a spring week. I think that the fact EY went ahead with the internship despite other companies cancelling theirs, and also paid their interns was a good representation of their attitude to their staff. The level of work required was not stressful at all so I was very happy to find out we were getting paid for it.

Yes there were a few opportunities in the small group meetings with existing staff to talk one on one and meet new people, however these were fairly limited and the discussion was mostly to do with EY itself rather than networking opportunities. The case study groups were a nice experience to meet other interns as well as existing staff already at EY who guided us in the study and were able to properly chat with us.

(Refer to previous answer)

Yes we were told about various societies as well as charity events held by staff.

Yes I would definintely recommend this to a friend, it was a very interesting insight into life at EY as well as the assurance stream. The length of the experience meant that I remained enganged and interested throughout it, with each day bringing a new and different topic. I was very impressed that we learnt some interesting skills for personal development as well as assurance and feel like this made the internship even more worthwhile.